Two senior Senate Republicans who can help deliver GOP votes that might be needed to end debate on an NSA/intel reform bill and then pass it are skeptical Reid would defy the White House and let senators vote on such a measure.

“He doesn’t let much of any legislation come to the floor,” Senate Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., told Defense News late last month. “But I think there’s bipartisan agreement that we need to have a debate over the NSA.”

Add to the skeptical list Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., an influential voice in the GOP caucus on national security issues.

“I think it deserves hearings and it deserves a legislative vehicle that would then have debate and amendments,” McCain said.“But, unfortunately, the majority leader doesn’t seem to like that legislative process.”

Even MSNBC has noticed that Harry Reid has kinda sorta given himself a reputation in this regard:

Todd sat down with the Nevada senator on Thursday for a wide-ranging discussion. At one point, the reporter asked Reid about the lack of bills or other activity emanating from the U.S. Senate.

Reid blamed recalcitrant Senate Republicans for holding up bills in committee. “You don’t believe Democrats play any role in this?” Todd asked. “It feels like a tit-for-tat game,” the reporter added, explaining that Democratic leadership has sometimes made it difficult for Republicans to amend bills important to them.

First…please remember, you should be adding more of your own commentary than the material you copy. A one sentence “zinger” followed by 2 paragraphs of copied material will get your comments deleted.

Second…Republicans are practicing scorched earth politics whether through holding up bills, or poisoning bills via amendments that they know are outside the bounds of reason–frequently having no relevance to the bill under consideration.

In other words, Republicans are using amendments as just another tool in their stated goal of obstructing anything and everything “Obama”.

This is well known and openly recognized by all sides. If you didn’t know that, you’re a fucking idiot.

First…please remember, you should be adding more of your own commentary than the material you copy. A one sentence “zinger” followed by 2 paragraphs of copied material will get your comments deleted.

Just mine, or those of all of the left-leaning types that do the same thing, too?

My comments @1 @3 were directly on point relative to a thread topic – a DelBene amendment of a House bill – and needed not much more than a summary of salient sentences in the linked passages.

Second…Republicans are practicing scorched earth politics whether through holding up bills, or poisoning bills via amendments that they know are outside the bounds of reason–frequently having no relevance to the bill under consideration.

Through changes in Senate rules, ‘filling the tree’, and simply ignoring House-passed bills he would prefer either not to see advanced or not to see his weakened colleagues have to vote for, Reid has essentially made it impossible for the GOP to offer alternatives in a large and growing number of instances.

If Frist had gone ‘nuclear’ when he had the opportunity, Democrats would have done the same thing as the GOP, had they seen their deliberative options disappear as has happened to the GOP.

Yes, the GOP is to some extent being political. Every time Reid brings up the Koch brothers, so is he. This is news?

From Goldy’s bio on HA:

A mix of snark, satire, muckraking, and surprisingly thoughtful analysis, HorsesAss.org quickly became the most influential blog in WA state, and one of the most widely read local political blogs in the nation.

I see the snark and satire isn’t as popular to HA types when it’s not one-sided.

@12 Oh, bullshit. The GOP didn’t become obstructionist because the Dems went ‘nuclear.’ It’s the other way around. Reid and his Senate colleagues went ‘nuclear’ because the GOPers were obstructionist. When the Republicans ceased to be an opposition party and chose to be a brick wall, the only sensible thing for Democrats to do was tell them to shut up and sit down.

I was reading a financial blog this morning and ran across a comment by a conservative poster who said he admired Putin and his governing style, and wishes Putin instead of Obama was running our country.

I think this genuinely reflects the actual attitudes of many on the right; and then, they have trouble understanding why we liberals think there’s no place at all for them in public discourse.

Not so long ago, if a Democrat had expressed such sentiments, GOPers would have demanded a treason trial and called for his head on a platter.

Was that before the Democrats emptied a passed House bill, inserted ACA, and then passed it themselves in the dead of the night at Christmastime, the result being a massive change to one-sixth of the nation’s economy, or did they wait until afterwards to do that?

I was reading a political blog this morning and ran across a comment @8 by a liberal poster who advocated running over opponents with a vehicle and, just to make sure the job was done right, doing it again.

I think this genuinely reflects the actual homicidal attitudes of many on the left….

Your mention about certain comments having no place in public discourse was particularly hypocritical, but also wholly unsurprising.

@16 You talk like ACA was sneaked through Congress. Who are you trying to kid? Democrats spent months trying to bring GOPers to the table and get them to participate in writing this legislation, but all they got was “no, no, no!”

And do I need to remind you again that the template for ACA was a plan devised by the conservative Heritage Foundation and adopted by Republican Governor Romney in Massachusetts? This was Republican legislation, for God’s sake! Most Democrats wanted government-run single payer. Adopting ACA instead was a gargantuan accommodation of Republican and conservative wishes.

Yes, the country was polarized over health care reform. One party represented ordinary working families who were drowning in medical debts and terrified of medical bankruptcy. The other party liked things just the way they were, and was unwilling to vote for even minor reforms.

ACA was a revolution. It’s what happens when the rich and powerful kick the penniless peasantry one time too many.

Nearly 2.7 million registered nurses taking home so much more money than the other 9 most common occupations in this country. Nearly twice as much!

Nursing used to be considered “women’s work” in your glory days. Now men are entering the nursing profession in droves! Men are getting fucked over left and right by the greed class in this country – dealing with their shit piss and vomit while they lie helpless in a hospital bed is nothing and making union scale is a cherry on top!

Very soon you’ll be recommending busting those nurses unions – well shit you’ve always done that! Next to the trial lawyers it’ll be the prime target for “bending the cost curve” – right wing ding style!

“Just mine, or those of all of the left-leaning types that do the same thing, too?”

You only need to worry about your comments. Enforcement is thin, but since you show up during election years and engage in excessive dumping of this type, I am giving you a heads-up now.

“My comments @1 @3 were directly on point relative to a thread topic – a DelBene amendment of a House bill – and needed not much more than a summary of salient sentences in the linked passages.”

No they weren’t on point. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But, fortunately for you, this is an open thread, so you can dump whatever bullshit you’ve sold your dignity for.

“Through changes in Senate rules, ‘filling the tree’, and simply ignoring House-passed bills he would prefer either not to see advanced or not to see his weakened colleagues have to vote for, Reid has essentially made it impossible for the GOP to offer alternatives in a large and growing number of instances.

If Frist had gone ‘nuclear’ when he had the opportunity, Democrats would have done the same thing as the GOP, had they seen their deliberative options disappear as has happened to the GOP.”

the Republican plot to obstruct President Obama before he even took office, including secret meetings led by House GOP whip Eric Cantor (in December 2008) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (in early January 2009) in which they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular President-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio Senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.”

You are lying and you know it. Either that or you have so brainwashed yourself to the extent you totally detached from reality.

“Yes, the GOP is to some extent being political. Every time Reid brings up the Koch brothers, so is he. This is news?”

Must you persist in such sloppy thinking? Dissing the Koch brothers is not equivalent to legislative obstructionism. Sloppy, sloppy thinking.

“I see the snark and satire isn’t as popular to HA types when it’s not one-sided.”

Wait. What!?!? Really? You think your underlying commentary should be immune to criticism because it is conveyed as snark????

That’s as hilarious as it is illogical. You trolls attack snarky posts and comments all the time. And now you are whining about having your own ideas criticized?

Here’s the deal…snark is just a form of communications. Using snark doesn’t magically make the underlying content immune from criticism.

In my experience, your snark is so filled with illogical connections, bad analogies, irrelevant anecdotes, and backward causality that it simply begs to be attacked.

Has he passed little Ricky Bobby? If so my condolences.. Needle sticks are a hazard. Damn the shit and piss of cancer patients – that’s hazardous waste that causes cancer in itself. All of that and more and some of the freaking hospital and clinic operators want them to handle 6 patients during a shift and work 7 12 hour shifts in a row whenever they can fucking get away with it.

After all there’s that bloated administrator’s salary to pay. The Rick Scott’s of the world huh?

I’m sure your brother was a conscientious nurse who opened the window to let the patient’s spirit out post-mortem.

I hope he didn’t have a freaking clue how much his brother looked down his snoot at his union enabled wage scale. Go WSNA!

I’m not whining about being attacked. I’m pointing out targeted deletions of commentary you don’t like, while permitting a far greater number of similarly structured posts through ‘thin enforcement’. There’s a difference.

Attack away.

As for obstructionism, it’s not like one party planning to foil another party is anything new:

• One Obama aide said he received a similar warning from a Republican Senate staffer he was seeing at the time. He remembered asking her one morning in bed, How do we get a stimulus deal? She replied, Baby, there’s no deal!

“This is how we get whole,” she said with a laugh. “We’re going to do to you what you did to us in 2006.”

GOP objected to a massive stimulus which provided far too little at far too high a cost. Not a whole lot different from Dem objections to GWB43’s efforts to change Social Security at the beginning of his second term. They saw little good and a lot of risk. So they obstructed. At the SOTU they applauded themselves for doing so.

Here’s the DNC head in 2005: “We, as Democrats, have got to stand up and fight aggressively from day one,” said outgoing national party chairman Terry McAuliffe, who has been asked by some Democratic lawmakers to retain his position as head of the Democratic National Committee (search).

Hoping to re-energize a party demoralized by Sen. John Kerry’s defeat in the 2004 presidential election, Democrats plan confrontation, McAuliffe said.

“We disagree with George Bush. Fifty-six million people came out and voted for John Kerry to defeat George Bush. Those 56 million people are counting on those Democrats to get in there and fight for them,” he said.

A little more than a year has passed since the first phase of the Brownback tax cuts went into effect on Jan. 1, 2013, so it’s possible to make a preliminary assessment of their effects. The early verdict: not too good. The jury is still out on whether lower taxes will stimulate businesses to expand and hire over the long term. But the immediate effect has been to blow a hole in the state’s finances without noticeable economic growth.

A little more than a year has passed since the first phase of the Brownback tax cuts went into effect on Jan. 1, 2013, so it’s possible to make a preliminary assessment of their effects. The early verdict: not too good.

Yeah Scott Walker’s “economic miracle” is on track as well:

Of course, that’s not what Walker promised during his 2010 campaign. He said it would happen during his first term, which ends in January. The state has added about 101,500 jobs since Walker took office.

It’s intriguing to compare the fiscally conservative lists with those designed to highlight science, technology, human capital, and innovation. A very different story emerges. Take the Milken Institute’s State Technology and Science Index 2012 (pdf). Massachusetts, Maryland, California, Colorado, and Washington are its top five, while Wyoming, Nevada, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Mississippi rank lowest. The 2010 State New Economy Index, by the Kauffman Foundation, praises Massachusetts, Washington, Maryland, New Jersey, and Connecticut, while South Dakota, Wyoming, Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Mississippi are in last place.

“I’m pointing out targeted deletions of commentary you don’t like, while permitting a far greater number of similarly structured posts through ‘thin enforcement’. There’s a difference.”

Here is were you are mistaken. I am sure RR can vouch for me: I’ve deleted many, many of his comments for not complying with the comment policy.

And don’t confuse temporal changes in enforcement with “targeting” individuals. When election year trolls show up, the comment threads tend to get a big increase in comments that fail “fair use.” I tend to up the enforcement (or at least try to coax people into compliance, like I am doing here).

In open threads, you can comment on just about anything you want. But if you copy someone else’s words, you need to justify that by adding your own substantive (and relevant) commentary.

@35. Democrats better be courteous to the republicans now, or republicans won’t be courteous if they take the senate? Are you kidding? Show me where republicans have been “courteous’ to Democrats over in the house.Republicans have no recent track record of being courteous or fair.

An interesting article aboutLevel 3: “[US ISPs are] deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers.”http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....l=facebook If I read that right, the very people who are lobbying for the end of Net Neutrality are slowing down the internet on purpose when it comes through through their systems.

“Do note that I’m replying to what’s already on the thread and not dropping bombs out of thin air.”

Okay…but feel free to drop bombs out of thin air in open threads. My recommendation, though, is that you mostly use your own words, not the words of others. Give a link, and offer a quote, if necessary. The whole package should be with the purpose of starting a conversation.

For example, Better’s comment @ 44 is an excellent example. Minimal quoting (with editing for brevity of the quote), a link, and then Better makes a point that invites more discussion.

(And, yes, I know there are a bunch of other comments in this thread that copy & paste without adding much commentary…my conversation with Travis Bickle on this applies to everyone. And I’ve not deleted anyone’s comments over this recently.)

Please. Yes, the GOP obstructs now more than Dems did in the GWB43 era, and in turn (perhaps related to the 2000 election results, perhaps because of the way things are trending) Dems obstructed GWB43 more than the GOP obstructed Clinton. The days of Reagan and O’Neill are long gone.

If control flips in 2015 and in 2017 it will be Democrats screaming to reintroduce the filibuster or otherwise wanting to undo what they’ve done just recently.

Politics is becoming more partisan and this may explain the trend. I have no idea whether the GOP will retake the Senate or if they’ll find new and creative ways to own-goal themselves and leave it in Reid’s control this November. I do have a feeling that the arguments by each side about obstructionism vs. duty might change in the next several months.

Although the U.S. is said to be in the midst of an economic recovery, the percentage of Americans lacking consistent access to food has been stuck at the same level since 2008, the heart of the Great Recession. Congress hasn’t helped matters any by deciding to slash food stamp benefits at just the wrong moment.

And yet Conservative Politicians would rather scream Bengazi over and over, instead of helping their constituents. Never mind that in the 1983 attack, a terrorist truck bomb killed 241 American soldiers, under St Reagan’s watch.

Just checking in… I’ve been in the hospital three times over the last five months, for a total hospital stay of over four weeks. I’m working from home now while I wait for a transplant to become available. So I haven’t felt up to posting too much lately.

I may duck back in from time to time just to see who’s doing what these days.

Travis Bickle @ 47, Democrats did not give up the idea of legislating and governance. They blocked selectively based on the usual political differences. The current Republicans have taken a blanket approach of blocking EVERYTHING–America be damned. It is a shameful abdication of legislative responsibility.

“If control flips in 2015 and in 2017 it will be Democrats screaming to reintroduce the filibuster or otherwise wanting to undo what they’ve done just recently.”

The filibuster is still in place except for (most) presidential nominations. That is…the legislative filibuster is in place, only the “advise and consent” filibuster has been removed.

That said, Dems can justifiably make the argument to restore the “advise and consent” filibuster by pointing out they are not engaging in blanket obstructionism and therefore the full filibuster should return. Republicans would likely not buy it.

I suspect the Republicans, in continuing their scorched earth philosophy, will go much further and eliminate the legislative filibuster.

Just mine, or those of all of the left-leaning types that do the same thing, too?

Travis Bickle, you are arguing with the demented perfessa. Why worry your fingers? You’ll never win cuz this a libtard blog.

DUMMOCRETINS always receive a pass on this blog. Take a few minutes and Google conceptguerilla site:horsesass.org as one example. Another example is Sidney Blumental The whole freaking article was copied by the IDIOT Wabbit and then copied into more threads. rujax has copied whole articles into HA DUMMOCRETINS (the real horsesasses here) with little or no commentary or reminders about the two paragraph limit.

If you are a DUMMOCRETIN you get a pass. If not you are thoroughly scrutinized!

Not so long ago, if a Democrat had expressed such sentiments, GOPers would have demanded a treason trial and called for his head on a platter.

How quickly HA’s resident IDIOT Wabbit forgets the DUMMOCRETIN commentary captured on Zomblog! Google it! Puddy has delivered it many times. Just ask the crazed clueless cretin. He’ll regale you with various link numbas from the crazed satanbaze!

“he Federal Communications Commission announced a $2.9 million fine Thursday against … a New Mexico-based firm that … continued to place robocalls … despite having been warned against doing so …. Dialing Services … worked with Republican candidates and conservative causes … including Mitt Romney, Tom Tancredo and George W. Bush.”

@34 “GOP objected to a massive stimulus which provided far too little at far too high a cost.”

Republicans did that to get even with Democrats? I thought they did it because they like high unemployment. Desperate jobseekers keep wages down, you know. Depressions are a cheap labor conservative’s wet dream.

@34 (continued) But GOPers didn’t hesitate to shove $1 trillion down a rathole to fight an unnecessary war, with a country that didn’t attack us and wasn’t a threat to us, from which we got nothing but coffins and broken bodies and a blank check for future veterans medical care and disability benefits.

So please take your sanctimonious moralizing about spending taxpayer money and shove it back up your hypocritical ass where it came from and where it belongs.

@41 “I am sure RR can vouch for me: I’ve deleted many, many of his comments for not complying with the comment policy.”

Yeah, the HA moderators pick on everyone. They claim to run a liberal blog, with free speech and all that, but they kick defenseless little rabbits like we were soccer balls. Dozens, if not hundreds, of my comments have been mercilessly deleted.

When you’re Ben Rhodes, an assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and you’ve been tasked to prep U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on how to deflect blame from the Obama administration for the Benghazi massacre, it’s good to have a brother who happens to run a TV network quite willing to push the White House spin.

David Rhodes was the boss of Sharyl Attkisson, the CBS reporter who left the network after it became well nigh impossible to continue the same dogged reporting on Benghazi as she had done on the Fast and Furious administration gun-running operation and get the truth beyond the CBS firewall.

David Rhodes… we’re not stupid. Sharyl has shown the world your hand and it’s full of low unmatched cards. How did David Rhodes know what the whitey house was thinking JUST AFTER the attack. Did leetle bro tell him whitey house thoughts and strategy as a scoop for big bro?

Hmmm…? Maybe Trey Gowdy should subpoena David Rhodes and ask how did he know this so early the next day? Now that would be really interesting.

Dude, while Puddy hates your worthless politics, Me and Mrs Puddy will pray for a successful organ acquisition and a successful transplant operation. It is always better to argue with you than the bottom dwellers of HA.

That said, Dems can justifiably make the argument to restore the “advise and consent” filibuster by pointing out they are not engaging in blanket obstructionism and therefore the full filibuster should return.

Uh huh. Democrats can change things as they please due to high-minded ideals. Got it. Having one’s cake and eating it too is classic Roger Rabbit rhetoric. I’m rather surprised to hear it from you.

Speaking of duty, as I did @ 47 above, I was amused to note Senator Warren’s use of the same term:

“If Republicans continue to filibuster these highly qualified nominees for no reason other than to nullify the president’s constitutional authority, then senators not only have the right to change the filibuster, senators have a duty to change the filibuster rules,” Warren said. “We cannot turn our backs on the Constitution. We cannot abdicate our oath of office.”

As long as we’re discussing Sidney Blumenthal, we might as well read what he said about how the 9/11 attacks came about:

“Bush’s approach in most situations seemed a reactive combination of calculations to avoid his father’s mistakes and to reject Clinton’s policies. This was especially clear in international affairs: in his first nine months he reversed Clinton’s policy toward China, proclaiming it no longer a ‘strategic partner’ but a ‘strategic competitor’; in the Middle East, by withdrawing U.S. involvement in the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians; toward Korea, by abandoning the negotiated accord that had frozen the North’s nuclear program and by humiliating President Kim of South Korea, who was promoting North-South reconciliation, during his March 2001 visit to the White House, contributing to a wave of anti-Americanism in a country that was among the staunchest American allies; by withdrawing U.S. support from the Kyoto treaty on global warming; and by forsaking Clinton’s efforts to address the dangers of international terrorism.

“During the transition between administrations, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger arranged several extensive briefings on this last subject for Bush’s incoming national security adviser, Condoleeza Rice, and others on the Bush team, including Vice President Cheney. One briefing lasted half a day. Berger told them that Osama bin Laden was an ‘existential threat’ and told them that he wanted ‘to underscore how important this issue is.’ In another briefing, Richard Clarke, head of counterrorism in the NSC, the single most knowledgeable expert in the government, gave them a complete tutorial on the subject. In yet another briefing, CIA officials were brought in to go over all the intelligence available on terrorism.

“Don Kerrick, a three-star general and outgoing deputy national security adviser, overlapped for four months with the new Bush people. He submitted a memo for the new National Security Council warning of the danger of terrorism. ‘We are going to be struck again,’ he wrote. But as Kerrick explained to me, he received no answer to his memo. ‘They didn’t respond,’ he said. ‘They never responded. It was not high on their priority list. I was never invited to one meeting. They never asked me to do anything. They were not focusing. They didn’t see terrorism as the big megaissue that the Clinton administration saw it as. They were concentrated on what they thought were higher priorities than terrorism.’ The Principals meeting of national security officials took up terrorism only once, after constant pressure from Clarke, on September 4, 2001, and at that meeting they discussed using unmanned Predator drone spy aircraft, but no decision was made. ‘Unfortunately,’ said Kerrick, ‘September 11 gave them something to focus on.’”

We know what their “higher priorities” were: Passing tax cuts for millionaires. Of course, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center, we were at war. But Bush responded to the attack by attacking a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and his leadership was so duplicitous that when he left office 7 1/2 years later, three-quarters of the American people still believed Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks. That was akin to Lincoln invading Panama because the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter.

It also does not escape attention that Sidney Blumenthal is a more credible source on this subject than Puddy is.

@61 “President Bush will renominate a group of judicial nominees who were blocked by Senate Democrats during his first term, the White House said Thursday.”

And thank God they were blocked, judging from the judicial opinions we’ve been getting recently from the ones who weren’t blocked. It’s a real shame the Democrats didn’t block more of Bush’s judicial nominees. Damn them for that.

@72 What you need to realize is that Republicans decided to shut the government down because the American people elected a president they don’t like, and we have to respond to that. These are not normal times. We’re not reacting to normal politics. The Republican Party has become a malignant cancer in our civic life, and we have to use radiation and chemotherapy on it so the patient doesn’t die. As a radiologist, you of all trolls should grasp the metaphor.

Robinson was once again fodder for MSNBC’s star liberal talk show host, Rachel Maddow, as she laughed her way through a report about Robinson sending out mailings to some 500,000 Oregon households seeking participants willing to send him twice-annual urine specimens.

“If you live in his district,” Maddow said, “he would like your vote, but if you live anywhere else on Planet Earth and you got to go, Art Robinson would like your pee.”

You apparently misunderstand the situation. The 3/5ths cloture vote is a strong preference for both parties.

There was no “cake” in eliminating the “advise and consent” filibuster. That was a last resort that Dems certainly did not want. And the Republicans did not want, either.

Both sides, Dems and Republicans, showed a strong preference for an “advise and consent” filibuster. Of course, that requires both sides to generally act with integrity and decorum.

By “integrity and decorum,” I don’t mean to say that a filibuster would never happen. It means that both sides would be acting in good faith. Sometimes a conflict in principles would result in a filibuster.

If the Republicans had acted with integrity and decorum, they would have been able to force the occasional filibuster the way Dems did on occasion with Bush. Rather, Republicans chose the scorched earth approach that led to a large backlog of nominees.

My point is that, if Republicans take the Senate, the Democrats can point out that they are not engaging in blanket obstructionism. Then everyone, Dems and Repubs, gets their stated preference: 3/5ths cloture prior to “advise and consent” votes.

And if the Democrats renege and engage in scorched earth politics, the Republicans would be perfectly justified in eliminating the 3/5ths cloture vote.

Roger Rabbit Commentary: How many millions did Corporate Agriculture spend to defeat a GMO initiative in Washington? And why do they want so badly to keep secret from us what they’re putting into our bodies? What’s in their products, anyway? I want to know.

Roger Rabbit Commentary: Of course, the biggest U.S. parasites are Republicans, but fortunately they’re fairly easy to recognize, and you probably won’t catch a disease if you don’t have sex with them.

When you’re a big bag superpower, you can treat defenseless people however you like — you can steal their homes, take their possessions, gas their pets, and dump them in urban slums 1,200 miles away without providing them with homes, furnishings, clothing, jobs, or money for food. And you can plow over their homes, pave over their island, and base your bombers there to make war against third world countries.

Wednesday, when Amtrak’s Empire Builder pulled into the Twin Cities, it did not pull into nondescript Midway Station as it has for most of it’s Amtrak tenure. Instead, it pulled into newly restored St. Paul Union Depot, or SPUD. Since the end of private passenger service, it had been a USPS processing center. The restored SPUD is a hub for intercity bus and passenger rail, and will soon host Metro Transit’s(the transit operator in the Twin Cities) Green Line light rail.http://www.railwayage.com/inde.....channel=41

He also @ 4 referred to GOP efforts to obstruct ‘everything Obama’, even though the increases in cloture motions and filibusters occurred in 2007, when Obama was still a senator, and didn’t change materially when Obama became president. Obama himself voted 8 times against ending debate in ’07-’08, even though his party controlled the Senate. So the linkage to Obama seems weak – a linkage to efforts to slow down the Democrats beginning in 2007 would seem much better supported.

Further, WaPo compared McConnell to Daschle in their respective tenures as Senate Minority Leader, this piece from several months ago:

WaPo points out that since 2007 Democrats had 120 actions blocked by GOP but still were successful 60+% of the time when contested. Most of these actions were nominations and not legislation, BTW. That’s an important point when one considers that both Obama and Darryl, above, were referring to the GOP legislative obstructionism.

By contrast, Daschle and the Democrat Senate minority in eight years +/- blocked Senate action 143 times and that in contested situations the GOP was successful only 32% of the time.

WaPo also points out that Reid’s method of doing business contributes to the tallies of cloture action. He keeps invoking it, even in cases of unanimous consent. It moves things along. It also increases the tally, which helpful bloggers and other types use to point out increases in ‘contested’ Senate action – see below.

I guess my points are that:

1. The GOP obstruction didn’t start with Obama, contrary to what Darryl may have alleged @4.

2. The tallies of cloture action/filibusters are in part driven by the way Reid does business.

3. Most of the ‘obstructionism’ isn’t legislative, which contradicts what both Obama said and Darryl wrote.

4. GOP hasn’t been very effective compared to recent comparison with Dems, when in the Senate minority.

If I had a fifth point to make it might be this: To me it seems that a lot of misinformation is driven by what we are given to read. It’s really easy to find pieces alleging GOP obstructionism. It’s a lot harder finding some analysis that suggests it isn’t because white men are obstructing a black president, and that it’s not that much different from when party roles were reversed, at least legislatively speaking. Maybe this:

Progressive Bloggers Are Doing the White House’s JobThis administration enjoys an advantage afforded no other: a partisan media that has its back, minute-by-minute.

Big surprise, the cheap labor conservative is arguing details so he can give his party a pass on being obstructionist.

Since 2007, there have been 527 cloture motions that have been filed, according to Senate statistics. This is apparently where Obama got his figure. But this tells only part of the story as many of those cloture motions were simply dropped, never actually voted on, or “vitiated” in the senatorial nomenclature.

And if you want to argue that Obama wasn’t absolutely accurate, I await your retroactive outrage over “Mission Accomplished”

With all due respect, Mr. President, you gave the Republicans a ledge to stand on so they could derail your agenda. They were on the ropes and ready for the final knock-out punch on the day you took office. Instead of finishing them off, you”reached across the aisle” and tried to “build consensus.” They held press conferences in which they said unequivocally that their #1 priority was to destroy you; you invited them over to the White House for beer and movies. Yes, Republican obstruction is wrecking this country, but if you hadn’t given them a chance to regroup and catch their breath it’s quite likely that non of this would be happening.

There is a fraction of democrats that is pissed that the President tried to work with the obstructionists. I don’t see any republicans tried to ease tensions, to reach across the isle and make progressives understand they are not really obstructionists. Where are the republicans vocally trying to get along?

In response to my point @ 89 that Obama was given the maximum lie rating in a speech, you quote from the same speech?

Now, that’s persuasive.

As far as your failure to identify GOP senators willing to work with Obama, consider Susan Collins as a start. There are others. If your requirement is blind allegiance to the president regardless of policy or it’s obstructionism, then, I agree with you, there’s no one on the GOP side who will not obstruct him from time to time.

“The Kellogg Company … said on Thursday that it had agreed to drop the terms ‘all natural’ and ‘nothing artificial’ from some products … as part of a settlement agreement ending a class-action lawsuit. … The settlement … comes at a time when food companies are facing a number of lawsuits over ingredients and labeling.”

Roger Rabbit Commentary: Why has American business become so goddamned dishonest? Remember how hard they fought to defeat GMO labeling? If a company doesn’t want you to know what’s in its products, you probably don’t want to buy anything from them.

Typical Cheap Labor Conservative tactics, argue that some detail is wrong or exaggerated, desperate to deflect attention from the big picture. Republicans resist any and everything the President does, regardless if it’s good for the country. We know it, they know it.

@92 But what the American people think of the last Republican administration to run their country is relevant, don’t you think? Let’s review what that administration did:

1. Ignore pre-9/11 warnings about terrorism. 2. Did nothing to prevent 9/11. 3. Turned huge surpluses into huge deficits. 4. Started two wars it couldn’t finish. 5. Lied about the pretext for one of those wars. 6. Lied about surveillance of law-abiding American citizens. 7. Lied about torturing people. 8. Dismantled regulation of banks. 9. Did nothing to stop housing bubble. 10. Did nothing to prevent mortgage-backed securities meltdown. 11. Tried to dismantle social security and medicare. 12. Tried to take combat pay away from troops fighting in Iraq. 13. Warehoused wounded soldiers in moldy barracks. 14. Gave billions of taxpayer money to crony contractors. 15. Ran the most corrupt administration since Harding. 16. Botched Hurricane Katrina disaster response. 17. Presided over Cheney’s secret energy task force chaired by Enron criminal Ken Lay. 18. Ignored corporate lawbreaking. 19. Encouraged companies to offshore American jobs. 20. Appointed justices who gave us Citizens United and struck down the Voting Rights Act.

There’s lots more, but my point is, the best way for the American people to evaluate how Republicans would run the country is to look at what the last Republican administration did, and that record is so dismal that anyone who voted Republican then, or votes Republican today, deserves to have his voter registration revoked for malpractice.

Good God, You read the comments on that Nat Jorn article? The raving conservative fringe in are in full HATE mode with death threats like “After the war, after we have tried and executed the elite traitors… We are coming for you and your families lib scum.” And you conservatives want people like that on YOUR side? Isn’t that what Red Chinese did to the intellectuals? Choose your enemies well, for you will become most like them.

Roger Rabbit Commentary: In my opinion, owning rental property is strictly for professionals. If you buy the property with bank money, the rent probably won’t cover the mortgage payment. You need to be your own electrician, plumber, painter, and repairman, because hiring tradesmen to maintain and repair the property will more than eat all your profit margin. Above all, you must know how to screen renters, and this work probably is best hired out to professional firms who can check credit histories, verify employment, look for criminal records, talk to references, and determine from past landlords whether there are likely to be problems. After my one experience with being a landlord a number of years ago, I decided that investing in stocks is much easier, safer, and far more profitable.

@102 You can’t have a conversation with people like that. Only thing to do is settle it in the voting booth, and if they lose, tell them to go fuck themselves. There’s absolutely no reason to give such people a seat at any table.

@108 Keep in mind this country doesn’t want to be ruled by Republicans. They lost the popular vote for president in 2008 and 2012, and for House and Senate in 2006, 2008, and 2012. The only reason the GOP holds a majority of House seats right now is because of abusive gerrymandering that is so unrepresentative it really should be struck down by the courts. The GOP also enjoys unrepresentative influence in the Senate because small states like Alaska and Wyoming get the same number of Senators as populous states like California, New York, and Illinois — which is inherently undemocratic. Republicans are disliked and rejected by a solid majority of Americans but have figured out how to leverage the constitution’s checks and balances into power they don’t deserve and didn’t earn at the ballot box. Should they parlay that into control of our government again, you should expect Democrats to use the same tactics Republicans use to keep them from implementing their agenda. You know, checks and balances. The system is designed to give the minority a veto over the majority; and if Republicans can do that, so can we.

It’s hard to enact legislation, but it’s also hard to repeal it, once enacted. To pass health care reform, Democrats had to win the White House, a Senate supermajority, and a House majority, which they did in an election that can be fairly interpreted as a massive public repudiation of the Republicans who preceded them. To repeal ACA, the GOP will need to win all three, including a Senate supermajority, which is highly fucking unlikely. ACA probably is here to stay. Republicans had 30 years to deal with our failing health insurance system, and did absolutely nothing. Democrats had to enact a bill without any Republican cooperation or votes, and they did. It was the Republicans, not the Democrats, who neglected the legitimate needs of tens of millions of Americans and then behaved in an obstructionist, negative, and destructive manner. So fuck them. We’re going to defend social security, medicare, and ACA — period. Any Republicans who don’t want to live in a country with a safety net are welcome to move to Somalia, or Yemen, or North Korea. I’ll help them pack.

First, I didn’t see or hear about or cite Obama’s claim, and nothing I said hinges on it.

Also, I did not limit the Republican’s scorched earth approach to legislative obstructionism. Obviously, the advise and consent of nominees has been so horrible that Dems eliminated the 3/5 majority requirement (given the limited nature of it, we might call it a “atomic option” rather than the “nuclear option”).

What I did cite was the Grunwald article (& book) that documented the fact that the Republican House and Senate majority leaders had meetings just before Obama took office to set their strategy of total obstructionism. This is not in dispute.

And unless you haven’t been paying attention, you would know that Republicans have obstructed nearly everything of consequence using a plethora of tools. Besides simply invoking or threatening to invoke a filibuster (and occasionally doing REAL filibusters), they have used senatorial holds, they have gummed up things in committee, they have refused to pass appropriations bills in the house (hence, a government shutdown), they have refused to engage in good faith negotiations, they have simply stonewalled to bring to a slow grind. They have engaged in crazy wastes of time, like over 50 House “attempts” at repealing ObamaCare. In short, they have abdicated their responsibilities to legislate and left behind gridlock. The most recently completed Congress, the 112th, is now the record holder for the least productive Congress EVER.

Obama Senate record is irrelevant. It isn’t even relevant that some of the Republican obstructionism may have started prior to 2009. This is not a “both sides do it” issues. Empirically, Republicans have engaged in obstructionism that goes way beyond anything we have seen in recent history. It is documented as an intentional strategy. And empirically we have seen this as the great “do nothing” set of sessions and record-breaking delays in filling court positions. We have seen senatorial holds abused despite attempts to fix the process in 2007.

The reality isn’t changed just because Obama got the number wrong. And the right numbers are not a fiction of the media. The government shutdown wasn’t a figment of our imaginations. The holds are not imaginary. The backlog of judicial nominees relative to past Presidents were not fictitious. The threatened or actual filibusters on significant pieces of legislation are not imaginary. Rand Paul really did hold the senate floor until he nearly (or actually) shit his pants. Ted Cruz really did read a Dr. Seuss story with the moral “Try it, You’ll Like it” in his insane opposition to ObamaCare. The Congressional research service did not fake these data. And, ignoring the projected numbers, People for the American Way, did not fudge these numbers.

Yeah…”reality has a well-know liberal bias”, and all that, but, seriously, you are engaging in near-pathological self delusion in your denials.

If they had similar views about black people, they would never get away with it.

Was the clippers coach bullied? Was it not free speech?

What if these guys publicly thought all woman are whores? Would that be an issue? Would it not be free speech?

How about if it were two gay guys, married, stating that all woman are whores? I don’t think I had to go that far for an example, because I would hope it wouldn’t be any more acceptable if two heterosexual men said it.

Someone tell me why is it so acceptable to shit on, discriminate, and deny gays equal freedoms? What is the debate?

Are you telling me the debate is about Religion? And that I don’t have the right to believe in my own religious values, but I have to abide by your religious values?

How can conservatives even think that they are on the right side of the argument. Them being on the wrong side of the argument, only shows that they are on the wrong side of every argument.

You want to fight for second amendment rights but then deny others, other types of rights?

You want small government and you want the government to get out of the way, but then get in the way of Gay Marriage? Where is your Gaston Flag – “Don’t tread on me”

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